It's on the internet so it must be true.

As I read my morning paper today I was informed in a small article that 80% of Swedish (equivalent to) A-level students are getting half or more of their information for essays, projects or whatever from the internet and not from their course books. Surely this comes as a surprise to noone? I for one think that this is terrific news. Not only does it cripple the monopoly on information that our schools have had for so long, it also gives the students a valuable experience in looking for information, and in extent processing and using information. However. Out of these 80%, 80% (yes, that's 80% of 80% of students total) claim they trust the information they find on the internet. When they hand in their work based on this information, is anyone going to question them on it? "Oh, you found this on the internet, did you? Well, that's fine then." Students are at most required to cite the website they got the information from. In special cases they're required to print a copy of it and hand in as an appendix. This mainly serves the purpose of allowing the teacher to check whether the student have actually done the work himself or if he's just printed it off www.howtoscoreanawithouthavingtodoanywork.com (that's not a real address btw).
In my humble opinion, schools are failing their students here in the sense that they don't teach them the first thing about source criticism. That's hardly surprising either. For years and years students have been given one (1) book on history, one (1) on civic science and so on and they're expected to learn what it says. That in itself is pretty poor, but when it comes to the magnificent, yet incredibly unreliable, source that we refer to as the internet it's absolutely vital that they know that not everything is true. Not even if it looks serious enough. But in a way this feels defining of our society as a whole. We don't like individuals who question information fed to us by various people and institutions. Without disappearing into a little cloud of neo-lefty scepticism, I just want to say that critical thinking is such a useful tool. And today more than ever it's what we need to teach people. The modern man and woman are absolutely drowned in a huge tidal wave of information. Every single day. So yeah, if I ever run for president or prime minister or whatever, I'll introduce two hours of source criticism/critical thinking every week from the age of er... 10 to graduation from Oxford.